The Internet can generally be described as a group of networks in the form of Autonomous Systems (AS). The ASs may belong to different owners and be connected by Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) peering; such peering may involve exchange of IP traffic based on eBGP sessions. Parties such as content and/or service providers generally mutually agree to peering and thus make public the addresses of servers, routers etc. on their ASs. Peering can take place between networks of many types and may be a customer/provider based peering, or a peer/peer settlement-free interconnect type peering.
Increasingly, entities such as service and/or content providers need the ability to deliver content to a particular AS such as an eyeball network (‘eyeball’). An eyeball may present the content to the end-user, e.g., a machine and/or terminal for example having a user-(man-machine) interface. An eyeball may be a local provider of fixed and/or mobile telephone, television and/or broadband Internet services. The content delivery may however be impeded by the lack of any direct relationship between the provider and the eyeball: The eyeball may be neither a customer nor a peer of the provider, and may be merely a customer of a third party; the third party may in turn be a customer of the provider; the provider may peer with that third party.
Such a provider may currently provide content to such an eyeball by routing the content through the third party network. This may however present technical difficulties concerning packet delivery performance and/or where the third party purchases Internet connectivity from the provider and may not wish to pay for delivering the provider's traffic to the eyeball.
On the other hand, use of a direct BGP peering between the provider and the eyeball, i.e., not involving the third party, would generally involve a settlement-free interconnect. This may not present a mutually beneficial arrangement.
As an alternative to such peering, it may be considered to use a Deep Edge Cache (DEC), e.g., a normal Content Delivery Network (CDN) server of the provider, dedicated to the particular eyeball. One or more links may be provided between the CDN device and eyeball as shown in FIG. 1, the CDN device generally providing a single type of content. This arrangement, which may be considered to be a 1:1 multiplex situation, may represent an inefficient use of the CDN device, since the CDN server may not be able to deliver every type of content and/or may be able to deliver only to a particular eyeball.
Alternatively, as shown in FIG. 2, multiple CDN devices, e.g., Deep Edge Caches, may be connected by respective links to respective eyeballs. This may be considered an extension of the 1:1 multiplex situation, with similar disadvantages regarding efficiency.
The arrangements of FIGS. 1 and 2 may further be undesirable for example because they do not provide dynamic routing, for example if static links such as non-BGP are employed.
There therefore remains a need in the field of content delivery to provide for example a content delivery path between non-peering autonomous systems such as a provider AS and/or an eyeball AS, and/or such a path that is more efficient for example in terms of inventory capital cost and/or usage of inventory capacity, that allows high performance packet delivery, e.g., with low latency and/or high reliability, and/or that allows dynamic and/or reliable routing, etc.